Zuzana Vikarská joins the Europa Institute as visiting researcher within the re:constitution fellowship programme
Zuzana Vikarská joined the Europa Institute in January 2021 as a visiting researcher within the re:constitution fellowship - a new programme funded by Stiftung Mercator comprising 20 fellows who have their own project. The fellows meet regularly to discuss work in progress and engage in academic mobility as well as practical internships. Zuzana will stay at the Europa Institute until the end of April for that purpose.
Zuzana’s project is about the notion of national and constitutional identities of EU Member States. She is arguing that while identity (embedded in Article 4(2) of the TEU) is rather weak as a legal concept, it can be extremely powerful as a political concept, both in a good and in a bad way. Zuzana argues in the context of the ongoing rule of law crisis, national (constitutional) identities could be easily abused - and we are already starting to see some first attempts of their dubious use. According to Zuzana it is therefore desirable to give identity some clear contours and to define its limits. For her the EU's own values should be the most important limit of national (constitutional) identities - and her project hopes to explain why this is so.
More information on Stiftung Mercator can be found here.